Easy Travel to Mars
It can sometimes be problematic finding your way around this turbulent, overcrowded earth. But if you have access to Google, it's now easy to explore Mars.
Google Mars provides elevation maps (showing altitude in relief), satellite photos created using a mosaic of visible light images, and views created with a mosaic of infrared photography. As with Google Earth, you can zoom in and out and navigate across the various views.
Other features are almost too numerous to list. You can browse links that list the regions of Mars, show you where spacecraft have landed, or that are the subject of stories about Mars. As an example of a story, here's the so-called face of the man on Mars. Unfortunately, "story" means a scientific account about a feature, not the wonderful Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars fantasies beloved in my youth, nor even Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy describing a terra-formed planet.
Using any of the three view modes, you can search the surface of Mars for mountains, canyons, dunes, plains, ridges, and craters. For example, here's the elevation map of the Burroughs crater, named after my hero, pulp fantasy writer Edgar R. He got a crater named after him that is a whopping 78 miles across. Where's Tarzan, or John Carter of Mars, when you need them?
All this is very cool. Very cool indeed. If you have too much time on your hands, go check it out right away.
Putting together these images, which are credited to NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), and Arizona State University was undoubtedly—as the About Google Mars page states—a great deal of fun, as well as real work.
But Google Mars inevitably raises the question, what is the point? I'm thinking that Google wants to lock-in its first-mover advantage for local search ads prior to the colonization of the red planet.
Posted by Harold Davis at March 27, 2006 02:59 PM
